On several occasions a hammering echoed around the hull when they passed through bands of suspended rock debris, like a spaceship striking asteroid belts.
Then, with a last jarring impact, the digger came to a standstill. An unceasing groaning sound reverberated through the vehicle, but at least they were no longer on the move.
Drake unstrapped himself and floated toward the rear hatch. “Everyone OK?” he asked, looking around. “Someone wake Sparks up!” he exclaimed.
Unbuckling himself, Will swam over and nudged the big man.
“Are we there already?” Sweeney asked, yawning.
“You’re unbelievable,” Will muttered, then he joined Drake by the hatch. Drake swiveled the handle and pushed. The groaning, now deafening, filled the interior. As Elliott, Sweeney, and the Colonel joined them, all they could see were rounded boulders bobbing up and down like apples in a barrel of water.
Drake closed the hatch so it was easier to hear him. “Right,” he said. “We’re going to rope ourselves together, then we might as well make a start across this zero-grav belt of yours, Will.”
“Um, there’s two things about that,” the boy began nervously. “First is that it’s bloody humongous, and there’s this thing my dad called the crystal belt across it. I really don’t know if I’ll able to find the way.”
Drake had the tracker in his hand. He let go of it, allowing it to spin several slow revolutions in the air before he caught it again.
“Trippy,” Sweeney said. “Never been in space before.”
Drake moved the tracker around until it let out a burst of clicks, and the needle twitched with the strong signal. It was pointing at the floor of the digger. “That’s the beacon you left by the Russian submarine,” he said.
“We landed upside down!” Elliott observed. The complete lack of gravity where they were in the Earth actually meant that this made no difference to them.
Then Drake pointed the tracker in the opposite direction — at the roof of the digger. Although the reaction was far weaker, it again registered a signal. “And that’ll be the beacon you planted in the opening on the other side of the belt, which is our way into the Colonel’s inner world. What could be simpler?”
“Suppose,” Will sighed, still not convinced.
“And what was the second thing on your mind?” Drake asked.
“Can’t we go across in this Coprolite machine?” Will proposed. “It would be safer.”
“It’s heavy and I want to conserve the propellants in the boosters,” Drake replied. “Better if we travel light.”
With that they all got themselves ready for the crossing. As though they were survivors from a shipwreck, they were each linked by a length of rope to a makeshift raft, which comprised the two nuclear devices and their other equipment, all lashed together.
When they exited the digger, both Drake and Will had the boosters ready. Since there was no way they could hear each other over all the noise from the crystal belt, Drake pointed at Will, who angled his booster and gave it the tiniest blip on the trigger.
The blue flame lanced from the funnel and they were off, but in completely the wrong direction. With several more attempts, Will was feeling more proficient at using the booster and steered them around the loose aggregation of boulders where the digger had come to rest. Then they were on the way out of Smoking Jean and rushing toward the huge emptiness, the far-off flicker of the lights from the crystal belt an unimaginable distance ahead of them.
Both Will and Drake took turns on the boosters, with Elliott continually checking the direction with the tracker.
Will intentionally gave the crystal belt a wide berth, just as he and Dr. Burrows had when they’d made the same journey. The boosters were far more effective than using the recoil from the Sten gun. Will had no conception of how fast they were actually moving, but the wind in their faces was so strong it snatched their breath away.
And after hours passed and they worked their way around the ethereal lights of the crystal belt, Will finally spotted the column of sunlight in the distance. He knew then that they were going to make it to the inner world.
ONCE THEY WERE OUT of the zero-gravity belt and moving into the cone-shaped opening, the rays of the second sun made everything shimmer as if they were underwater. Will continued to blip his booster to maintain their speed while Elliott checked the readout from the tracker. There was no way she could hear the clicking emanating from it: The rumble from the zero-gravity belt continued to drown everything out.
It was half an hour before Drake signaled that they should head for the side of the void. As soon as they touched down, he and Sweeney detached themselves from the raft of nuclear weapons and equipment. Then they slid one of the bombs into position behind a large rock, securing it in place with a rope. Drake immediately opened a hatch in its side and began to prep it for detonation.
“We did it,” Elliott sighed wearily, as she lay down in the scree.
“Yep. Never ever thought we’d be here again,” Will said, slumping next to her. They shared a bar of chocolate, washing it down with water from a canteen. There was a loud gurgling noise, and Will looked away in embarrassment.
“Ohhhh,” he groaned. “It’s messed up my stomach again.”
“Mine, too.” Elliott laughed. “It’s the low gravity, isn’t it?”
Will didn’t reply as he peered around in an attempt to find a feature he recognized from the last time they were there. He thought of the ledge where he, Elliott, and Dr. Burrows had landed, all of them immediately falling into a dead sleep because they were so thoroughly exhausted.
Will regarded the small Alpine plants around him — they were clinging on to the scree with trailing root systems like unraveled cotton, and there was also a number of the dwarf trees with tortured trunks. He could tell from the abundance of vegetation that they must have long since passed the ledge he’d been looking for. Realizing it was futile to try to find anything familiar — the vast scale of the place made that highly unlikely — he shut his eyes.
“Are you thinking about the Doc?” Elliott asked gently.
“The Doc?” he said, blinking his eyes open again. It took him a moment to work out who Elliott was referring to. She was using her and Drake’s nickname for his stepfather, Dr. Burrows.
“I suppose that means you weren’t,” Elliott decided after he failed to reply.
“No, I wasn’t, and, you know . . . I don’t think about him so much anymore,” Will admitted. “It’s funny — but you’ve got your dad back now, and I sort of feel as though mine’s gone. If all those years of Darklighting made him the way he was, then everything he did and said wasn’t really him . . . and he doesn’t seem so” — Will frowned, trying to come up with the right word — “important . . . so important to me any longer,” he said eventually.
“He was still your father,” Elliott reminded him.
Drake finally closed the panel in the casing of the nuclear weapon, replacing the screws to secure it, then rejoined everyone. Sweeney and the Colonel had attached a harness around the remaining bomb so that it would be easier to carry.
“Okeydoke,” Drake said, unhitching a radio detonator from his belt and pressing a sequence of buttons. Sweeney had an identical detonator in his hand. “Check?” Drake asked.
“Check,” Sweeney confirmed.
“Good — that’s one nuke ready to rock ’n’ roll,” Drake announced.
“Was ist das rock ’n’ roll?” the Colonel asked.
“Oh, sorry, I meant that it’s primed,” Drake explained. “I’ve also taken the precaution of installing an anti-tamper fuse on the inspection panel, and a trembler. So in the unlikely event that the Styx were to come all the way down here and stumble across our little surprise, it’ll go off as they attempt to open or move it . . . and the job will be done. This opening will be one almighty mass of fused silica, and nothing will ever get through again.” He turned to look down at the darkness of the zero-gravity belt. “Not that
it’s a viable route to the surface for them, anyway.”
“And the second bomb?” Elliott asked.
“You and Colonel Bismarck know the terrain, so I want you to help me locate the Ancients’ passage,” Drake replied. He squinted up at the sun. “If we use both boosters on full power, we can really motor it as far as we can get to the top. Then we’ll lug the device the rest of the way. And thank God for the low gravity.”
The boosters did help, but when the frequent bursts from them weren’t enough to counter the increasing pull of gravity, everybody had to muck in. In pairs they took turns to haul the nuclear weapon up the forty-five-degree incline, and it was a good twelve hours before they arrived at the massive crater that marked the top of the void.
“Here are we,” Drake said, putting on a pair of sunglasses. “Hope you all remembered to pack some sunblock.”
They were covered in the red soil, and so exhausted and cramped from the climb that they could hardly stand.
Sweeney stretched his back with a groan. As he removed his hat to mop his forehead, the full force of the globe in the sky above hit him. “Crikey!” he gasped. “That’s bright. It’s worse than the bloomin’ tropics.”
“Welcome to the Garden of the Second Sun,” Will said. “Or, according to what my dad thought, Eden.”
“Pretty bloody far from my idea of Eden,” Sweeney complained, putting his hat back on and surveying the surrounding foothills, which were covered with patchy woodland.
“Try jumping,” the Colonel suggested to Drake and Sweeney.
The two men regarded him for a moment, then Sweeney crouched down and leaped into the air. He reached three or four times the height he’d have been able to achieve Topsoil. They heard him chortling as he came back to Earth. He immediately jumped again, using his powerful legs to drive himself even higher. When he landed, he had a look of schoolboy glee on his face.
“Maybe this place isn’t so bad, after all.” He grinned.
Drake, Elliott, and Colonel Bismarck left with the nuclear device, and Sweeney found somewhere he and Will could wait out. He chose a depression on the side of the nearest foothill. It didn’t exactly give them much protection from the sun, but at least they weren’t in full view if any Styx decided to wander by.
Meanwhile, Elliott didn’t take long to locate the stream that would lead them to the waterfall and the entrance to the Ancients’ passage. But as they emerged from the jungle, what the three of them saw stopped them dead in their tracks.
The waterfall shielding the entrance had been dammed, and there was no sign of the idyllic pool, with the iridescent dragonflies, that it had originally drained into.
But that wasn’t what brought them to a halt.
As far as the eye could see, the trees had been cut down and the jungle turned into fields of sun-hardened mud. And on these fields an unbelievable number of tanks, personnel carriers, large-bore guns, and military aircraft had been assembled, all carefully arranged in ranks as if ready to bring into the tunnel at a moment’s notice.
“My army” was all Colonel Bismarck could murmur as he shook his head in disbelief.
“We didn’t get here a moment too soon,” Drake said. “If the Styx had finished widening the way through, this little lot would have found its way Topsoil . . . as toys for the Styx Warrior Class.” Drake was already scanning between the lines of equipment. “And there are bound to be sentries dotted about — we need to get in and out as quickly as we can.”
As Elliott kept watch, Drake and the Colonel took the bomb into the passage. Once they’d rejoined Elliott, Drake again used his radio detonator to prime it, pressing the sequence of buttons.
“Rock ’n’ roll?” Colonel Bismarck asked.
Drake nodded. “All done. Let’s get back to Will and Sparks at the rendezvous, then we can all go home again,” he said.
“I am home,” Colonel Bismarck pointed out.
Will and Sweeney had heard rumbles of distant thunder, but then there was a mighty peal, accompanied a moment later by a searing blue flash of lightning. It was visible even through the blinding sunlight.
“Whoa! What a buzz!” Sweeney said, clapping a hand to the side of his head. “That gave the old capacitors a jolt.”
“So lightning affects you, too?” Will asked.
“Only if it’s a full-on electrical storm,” Sweeney replied.
“Well, you get plenty of those in this place,” Will told him. “Are you going to be all r —”
“Hold on,” Sweeney interrupted him as he extracted his walkie-talkie from his pocket and read the small LCD. “It’s Drake. They’re not far now. It’s almost showtime.”
“And we only just got here,” Will said, but as tired as he was, he couldn’t have been happier that their mission was nearly over and that they would soon be leaving the inner world.
He and Sweeney heaved their Bergens on. As they started toward the crater, the wind picked up and the sun was obscured by angry black clouds.
Sweeney spotted Drake and the others emerge from the tree line in the distance. And, as the two groups came together by the lip of the crater, they found themselves in the middle of a full-blown monsoon.
“Nice weather,” Drake joked as soon as he was close enough to them. Taking his sunglasses off, he blinked the rain from his eyes.
“No problems with the locals?” Sweeney asked.
Drake quickly told him and Will about the huge amount of New Germanian hardware they’d seen waiting to be transported to the outer surface. “Sealing the route through should put a crimp in the Styx’s plans, once and for all,” he said. “And they won’t be able to reexcavate the Ancients’ passage for a good few decades because the rock will be too radioactive.”
The water was bucketing down around them, already forming large puddles on the ground. Not more than a couple of hundred feet away, a blinding spike of electricity struck the earth with such power that it left a small sizzling crater.
“Holy smokes!” Sweeney shouted, slapping his forehead.
“Let’s get down there, shall we?” Drake proposed, glancing over his shoulder at the crater, then back at Sweeney with concern.
“I’m not coming,” the Colonel announced abruptly. He was shouting to make himself heard over the sound of the wind and the torrential rain. “This is my country. I want to try to salvage what I can.”
“But how are you going to do that, Colonel?” Drake asked. “All by yourself?”
Colonel Bismarck indicated his Bergen. “I have a Purger in there. Maybe I can deprogram enough of my men to take on the Styx.”
Drake stepped over to him and shook his hand. “Good luck.”
“Good luck to you,” Colonel Bismarck replied, looking at each of them in turn.
“There should be minimal radiation up here from the nukes,” Drake told Colonel Bismarck. “But get yourself as far away as you can, just in case. You’ve got time, because I won’t detonate them until we’re well into the zero-grav belt. I’ll —”
He never finished the sentence as a shot rang out. Colonel Bismarck looked down at his chest, where blood from a gaping hole was mixing with the rainwater. It was a precise shot to the heart, and there was no question that he’d been fatally wounded.
He dropped to the ground, and everyone whipped around to see who was behind them.
“Nobody’s going to detonate anything,” Rebecca One said.
“No!” Will gasped.
As if it wasn’t enough that the Styx twin was standing there, beside her was Vane. It was the first time that Will or Elliott had seen a Styx woman for themselves. Their eyes widened at the sight of the woman’s cheeks puffed out by the three egg tubes wreathing in her mouth like snakes, and her limbs consisting of not much more than muscle and bone, while her abdomen was hugely distended.
She and Rebecca One were flanked on either side by a pair of Limiters, their weapons trained on Will and the others.
“Didn’t see us sneaking up on you, did you?” Rebec
ca One said smarmily. “Pretty sloppy for you, Drake.”
Will realized they must have approached around the inside lip of the crater. There was probably one of the odd-looking Drache Achgelis twin-rotor helicopters hidden in the jungle not far from where they were.
“Nice to finally meet you in the flesh,” Drake said tightly. He had his assault rifle slung over his shoulder and his hands in his pockets. Will couldn’t believe that he appeared to be so relaxed, given the circumstances. “How did you know we were here? Did you pick up the radio signals?” Drake asked.
Rebecca One shook her head.
“It was me,” Vane said, fluid spraying from her cracked black lips. “I smelled another female in heat.” She was staring straight at Elliott. “Why aren’t you joining with us in the Phase?”
“Me?” Elliott mouthed wordlessly.
“Golly, Gargoyle Lady can talk!” Sweeney chimed in as he smiled at Vane.
Her face creasing with fury, Vane reared toward him, three pairs of insect limbs flailing out from her shoulders.
“That’s new,” Will whispered as Elliott shot a glance at him.
“I . . . want . . . him,” Vane growled at Sweeney, one of the egg tubes poking from her mouth. “I want to lay my babies in him.”
Sweeney chuckled mirthlessly. “There’s an offer I can’t refuse.”
Vane’s insect limbs threshed furiously at this impertinence.
Rebecca One placed a hand on the Styx woman’s arm. “All in good time, Vane,” she said. “First, we’re all professionals here, so I don’t think you’ll be wildly surprised that I want you to lay down your weapons. My men have you in their sights, so no funny stuff.”
Thinking that it was all over, Will and Elliott had begun to comply, when Drake spoke. He had slipped his hands from his pockets.
“No,” he said.
“Oh, please,” Rebecca One sighed wearily. “Let’s not prolong this. You can’t escape — and I’ve got another detachment of men on the way. Take a look for yourselves if you don’t believe me.”